Self-driving Google car pulled over for driving too slowly in California

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Nov. 13 (UPI) -- A California police officer pulled a car over for driving 10 mph under the speed limit yesterday only to find out it was a self-driving Google car.

The Mountain View Police Department in the San Francisco Bay Area said an officer "noticed traffic backing up behind a slow moving car" on Thursday and pulled over what turned out to be a Google Autonomous Vehicle.

The incident was photographed by Aleksandr Milewski, who shared his photo on Twitter.

"The officer made contact with the operators to learn more about how the car was choosing speeds along certain roadways and to educate the operators about impeding traffic," the police department said in a blog post.

"The Google self-driving cars operate under the Neighborhood Electric Vehicle Definition per 385.5 of the California Vehicle Code and can only be operated on roadways with speed limits at or under 35 mph. In this case, it was lawful for the car to be traveling on the street as El Camino Real is rated at 35 mph," the department said.

Google's headquarters are in Mountain View, Calif., a few miles from where the car was pulled over by police.

The Mountain View Police Department said in a blog post that it meets regularly with Google to make sure their cars operate safely in the community.

The Google Self-Driving Car Project said in a Google+ post the speed of the prototype vehicles is capped at 25 mph "for safety reasons."

"Like this officer, people sometimes flag us down when they want to know more about our project. After 1.2 million miles of autonomous driving (that's the human equivalent of 90 years of driving experience), we're proud to say we've never been ticketed!" the project said.

"Driving too slowly? Bet humans don't get pulled over for that too often."